From the street, Paul and Victoria Craig’s house does not appear much different from the rest of the low-slung ranch houses that fill out their neighborhood in Richardson.

But there’s a flash of black glass-like panels from the roof. And curious passers-by are inundating the couple with questions. Are those solar panels? Do they really cut your electricity bill?

“A mechanic from the around the corner stopped by a couple weeks ago. I guess he was pretty fed up with his electricity bills, and when you tell people your electricity bill was $10, their ears perk up,” recounted Paul Craig. “There’s not a lot of solar around here. As far as I know, it’s just us.”

Solar is booming in the United States, with total capacity increasing 75 percent last year as equipment prices fell to a fraction of what they were just a few years ago. In places like California and Arizona, rooftop solar installations are becoming as common as chimneys and weather vanes.

But not so in Texas, where despite recent growth in hot beds like Austin and San Antonio, the technology remains largely remains on the fringe.

According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, Texas’ 107.5 megawatts of solar capacity is one of the lowest in the nation when sorted by population — Arizona’s per capita rate is estimated to be more than 30 times higher.

“Everybody does different things, but the constant is certainty,” said Emily Duncan, who heads the solar association’s government affairs division.

“You just never saw that in Texas,” she said. “And there is a lot of potential there. There are a lot of sunny days, lots of open land.”

Wind over sun

When the Texas Legislature set renewable energy goals in 2005, it gave the power industry 20 years to have 10,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity installed — enough to power 3.5 million homes. Any notion that was a long shot quickly evaporated as developers rushed to take advantage of the state’s new, lucrative renewable energy credits program.

With wind power being the cheapest option, turbines were soon going up in West Texas as fast as the wind that blows through there. By 2009, they had already surpassed the 2025 goals.

But with that quick success came a crash in the market for renewable energy credits.

“The wind farms would sell the credits to the [power companies], who needed to meet the state goals,” said Russel Smith, executive director of the Texas Renewable Energy Industries Association. “But the demand for credits just fell off.”

Around the same time, cheap solar panels from China began to flood the market — over the next four years the price of the average home system fell almost 80 percent. Long deemed too expensive by all but the most ardent environmentalists, solar was going into its renaissance.

To some degree that has happened in Texas, where capacity has almost quadrupled over the last two years, according to the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas. But while a sprawling 400-megawatt farm is going up in California’s Mojave Desert, bringing in $2.2 billion in investment, Texas’s largest solar farm, outside San Antonio in Webberville, is not even a 10th that size.

Environmentalists are quick to blame legislators in Austin for not setting up a centralized incentive program as other states have. Instead, the utility companies are left to their own devices, and while rebate programs exist for homeowners and small businesses, they are largely underfunded and often sell out within days.

“All the experience we have indicates we can spend money in other areas and get greater returns than we can with solar,” said Oncor spokesman Chris Schein.

Where it works

Exceptions are cities such as Austin and San Antonio, which have own government-run utilities and maintain large budgets for solar incentive programs. There, solar panels are increasingly common sights, taking on the almost fashionable status that has pervaded other U.S. cities.

“There’s a lot of factors that go into it,” Duncan said. “But there’s definitely a neighborhood envy where one house gets it, and then you start to see it pop up on all the other roofs.”

But money does not guarantee success.

Four years ago, Denton’s electric utility began offering residents up to $15,000 to install solar panels, about two-thirds the cost of the average home system and a lucrative offer in any state. Program director Lisa Lemmons estimates a system would pay for itself within three years through reduced electricity bills, leaving homeowners with virtually free electricity for the 20- to 30-year life span of the panels.

To date, 34 homeowners have taken the city up on its offer.

“In a town like ours, you’re not going to have hundreds of people coming to do this,” Lemmons said. “It’s still a matter of education about solar, disposable income. … We’re home to two large universities, so a good portion of our community is renters. They may be environmentally minded, but they’re not going to put up solar panels when they’re not staying.”

At the state level, it’s more endemic factors that drive consumers away, advocates say.

Earlier this month, the Legislature opted again not to require utilities to pay customers for the extra electricity that their solar systems produce — electricity not used in the instant it is generated flows into the grid.

Some power companies, such as TXU Energy, pay, but most do not, drawing backlash from homeowners who accuse them of stealing.

Mike Renner, an electrician, had his own solution. Over the last 14 years, he slowly added solar panel after solar panel, using how-to guides in magazines and a brother-in-law in the construction business. Eventually he installed a wind turbine that towers 100 feet in the air over his five acres outside Weatherford.

Then one day, looking over his bill and what the local utility was paying for his electricity, he decided he’d had enough.

“I shut my main breaker off, and I’ve been running purely off wind and solar,” he said. “The only thing they charge me is $15 for the meter.”

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